Best Quotes About Simplicity

List Criteria: Must be a famous or well-known quote. Vote for the simplicity sayings that strongly resonate with you, and downvote any you didn't like.

A list of the best simplicity quotes and sayings, including the names of each speaker or author when available. This list is sorted by popularity, so only the most famous simplicity quotes are at the top. The authors of these historic simplicity quotes are displayed next to each quote, so if you see one you like be sure to check out other inspirational quotes from that same writer.

This list answers the questions, "What are the best quotes about simplicity?" and "What are inspirational simplicity quotes?"

This list includes notable simplicity quotes by various authors, writers, playwrights, speakers, politicians, athletes, poets, and more. Vote on your favorites so that the greatest simplicity quotes rise to the top, as the order of the list changes dynamically based on votes. Don't let your favorite simplicity sayings get to the bottom of the list.

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Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them; but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive. Jean de La Bruyère

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Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated. Confucius

Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect. Charles Cooley

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My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. Ernest Hemingway

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God always takes the simplest way. Albert Einstein

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The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective. Warren Buffett

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A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it. James Fenimore Cooper

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A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long. Eugène Delacroix

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Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it. René Descartes

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The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in --telephonic, technological and relational --to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work. Jean Baudrillard

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14

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Everything is simpler than you think and yet more complex than you imagine.

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Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. Henry Ford

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Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginnings. Robert Collier

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. Albert Einstein

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Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein

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When the solution is simple, God is answering. Albert Einstein

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The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms. Albert Einstein

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Simplicity is the seal of truth.

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I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it. Henry James

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Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. Henry David Thoreau

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The trouble with measurement is its seeming simplicity.

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When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected. Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues

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The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply. Khalil Gibran

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It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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30

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I have always observed that to succeed in the world a person must seem simple, yet wise. Montesquieu

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31

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Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. Albert Einstein

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32

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I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. Oscar Wilde

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont

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35

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Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood --for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories. Graham Greene

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The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity. Doug Horton

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It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately. John Ruskin

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38

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Seek simplicity but distrust it. Alfred North Whitehead

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39

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Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear. David Seabury

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The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passion are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. Oscar Wilde

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Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.

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42

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Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do. Samuel Johnson

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43

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Simplicity is the intention, purity in the affection; simplicity turns to God, purity unites with and enjoys him. Thomas à Kempis

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To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. Bruce Lee

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Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject. Thomas Mann

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46

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Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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48

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It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential. Bruce Lee

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The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. Walt Whitman

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